Stolen Language?

Plagiarism in Writing

Shelley Angelil-Carter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138160767
• eBook ISBN: 9781317882107
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Real Language Series
General Editors-
Jennifer Coates, Jenny Cheshire and Euan Reid
This is a sociolinguistic series about the relationships between language, society and social change. Books in the series draw on natural language data from a wide range of social contexts. The series takes a critical approach to the subject, challenging current orthodoxies, and dealing with familiar topics in new ways.

The topic of plagiarism is a highly contentious issue and one that is of growing interest and importance in higher education across the world. Stolen Language? Plagiarism in Writing uncovers the reasons why students plagiarize, and explains what can be done about it. It challenges the concepts of original authorship of language, tracing the notion of plagiarism to the introduction of copyright laws in the eighteenth century. The analysis presented in this book explores plagiarism as complex and contested, and suggests that in student academic writing it may be the surface manifestation of learning difficulties related to the educational environment, the nature of academic discourse and the nature of language.
Underlying the concept of plagiarism is the premise that meaning is made by the individual, using the system of language at his or her disposal. The words and ideas then belong to the individual who first thought of them, or who first used these words in a particular way. New understandings, that language and cognition are fundamentally social and cultural, contest the idea of 'original thought' or 'original language'. In addition, what constitutes plagiarism differs depending on the genre and context of writing.
Stolen Language shows that there is in any good writing an authorial presence, an authorial voice which is particularly difficult for the novice writer to control when constructing an essay based on multiple texts. Written in a unique and accessible way, the book also looks at the particular difficulties experienced by writers of English as an additional language and provides a practical framework for academics and teachers of writing on how to develop authorial voice and critical thinking in the student writer.

1

Introduction: an overture

 

 

 

Academic staff often feel frustrated when students find academic referencing or citation difficult, and they are concerned about the prevalence of plagiarism. Generally referencing is seen by academic staff as a technical problem to which students need to apply their minds, whilst students (and teachers of academic literacy) find it a difficult problem to grapple with.

A letter to a University of Cape Town newspaper, the Monday Paper, responding to an article written by myself and Cathy Hutchings (1995), typifies some of the thinking about plagiarism:

From the outset I must declare an interest in the subject of plagiarism as I frequently encounter it when having to mark undergraduate work. My position is clear, any piece of work that is not properly referenced will result in the student being penalised. I will not sanction the deliberate theft of another person’s intellectual property. It is nothing short of outrageous to suggest that the protocols against plagiarism * are merely part of some academic -game. The suggestion that a student becomes so immersed in the subject that he/she is unable to differentiate between his/her own ideas and those gained from research is worthy of nothing but derision. Just as inflation is the scourge of a country’s economy, so is plagiarism the scourge of academic life.

(Letter to Monday Paper, 21–28 Aug. 1995)

The ‘scourge of plagiarism’ attitude will be a familiar one to many of those reading this book. Many academics spend hours attempting to ferret out the plagiarized source, feeling morally outraged and determined to find evidence for the crime. Plagiarism is seen as deceitful and dishonest, its perpetrators are fraudulent, and must be severely penalized. The language used is often about crime and investigation – ‘perpetrators’, ‘theft’, ‘penalize’ – and there seems to be perfect (unspoken) clarity on what constitutes ‘intellectual property’.

Murphy (1990) describes the ‘thrill’ of the ‘chase’ to find the sources the student has copied from, prove the student’s guilt, and have the student suspended from the university, as happened in one of the cases Murphy describes. Another of Murphy’s students, whom he suspected of plagiarism in an essay about her own anorexia, when interrogated by Murphy, eventually said that the paper was not about herself, but about a friend. She was given zero on the paper, as Murphy had felt that it was a hoax, and still suspected plagiarism. At the end of the semester, when Murphy collected her journal, he came across journal entries which were clearly sincere, and which indicated that the anorexia experience, as well as the essay, had been the student’s own. Murphy’s own bewilderment at what had happened is clear: he was ‘astonished and appalled’ (903) and ends his article with the words, ‘I did not mean for it to come to this’ (903). How did it come to this? Why is plagiarism considered such a heinous crime that some academics will spend hours in the library chasing up possible source material, and students will deny their own experience when suspected of plagiarism? What kinds of students, what kinds of writing cause academics to suspect plagiarism? Murphy calls it ‘an intuition, some feeling on the surface of the page, something about the dye of the ink that whispers this is counterfeit currency; the excitement of judicial self-satisfaction’ (900). What makes up this ‘intuition’, and how accurate is it? Why do students plagiarize, and what exactly can be counted as plagiarism?

There is no sense in the letter quoted above that plagiarism could be anything other than ‘deliberate theft of another person’s intellectual property’. What I hope to establish in this book is that plagiarism in the undergraduate years is not so much a matter of ‘deliberate theft’, though this of course occurs, but is rather a complex problem of student learning, compounded by a lack of clarity about the concept of plagiarism itself, and a lack of clear policy and pedagogy surrounding the issue. Plagiarism is a ‘naturalized’ concept which seems unquestioned by those who enforce its discipline. Citation is also a ‘naturalized* skill, so central to academic writing that much of its complexity is never made explicit.

Plagiarism is in fact a modern Western construct which arose with die introduction of copyright laws in the eighteenth century. Before this time, there was little sense of artistic ‘ownership’. Since then, the idea of ‘originality’ in writing has been highly valued. The analysis presented in this book will show that plagiarism is a complex, contested concept, and in student academic writing it may be the surface manifestation of complex learning difficulties which relate to the educational environment, the nature of academic discourse and the nature of language.

Underlying the concept of plagiarism is the basic premise that meaning is made by the individual, using the system of language at his or her disposal. The words and ideas thus originated then belong to the individual who first thought of them, or who first used these words in a particular way. New understandings, that language and cognition are fundamentally social and cultural, contest the idea of ‘original thought’ or ‘original language’.

In this book, however, I attempt to show that although the concept of authorship is under attack in postmodern thought, along with the notion of agency, there is in any writing an agent, an authorial presence. The presence of authorial voice in academic writing is particularly difficult for the student writer to accomplish when constructing an essay based on multiple texts.

I shall show that plagiarism is an elusive concept, difficult to define, meaning different things in different contexts and for different textual genres. My principal interest in writing this book is to understand what plagiarism means in the context of academic writing, and to explore what may be happening when a student writer is thought to be plagiarizing. The primary aim of this exploration, with the help of a theoretical framework and with the insights gained from interviewing students and staff and analysing writing, is to understand plagiarism differently. The secondary objective, which this book attempts to fulfil, is to find ways of communicating this new understanding to those who teach others how to become writers of academic discourse, and to writers of academic discourse.

 

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The Context: the social practice of language in academic development

Much of my thinking and exploration of plagiarism began when I was a lecturer in language development in the Academic Development Programme (ADP) at the University of Cape Town (UCT). The ADP began as the Academic Support Programme (ASP) in the early 1980s, to develop ‘bridging’ programmes for black students, inadequately prepared due to poor schooling, coming onto a campus which traditionally had catered mainly to white students from well-resourced schools. Particularly inadequate education was provided in schools run by the infamous Department of Education and Training (DET), which was the structure set up by the apartheid government to administer schooling to African children.¹

One of the early courses set up by the ASP was an English for Academic Purposes course, which concentrated on ‘bridging’ for the Arts and Social Sciences, and in other faculties many other foundation courses and supplementary -tutorials followed. In the early 1990s, it became clear that the university did not have the resources to support growing numbers of black students in these programmes, and that the university itself was inadequately prepared for enabling the potential of all its students to be fulfilled. The focus of the ASP began to turn from students to learning environments, concentrating on staff and curriculum development to cater for student diversity, whilst still retaining the support structures, and the ASP became the Academic Development Programme. A Writing Centre was set up to provide writing development consultations for all students, as well as to work with academic departments across the curriculum.

Within this context, we had encountered great difficulty with the practice of citation or referencing in academic writing in our teaching of English for Academic Purposes, and in the experience of the Writing Centre. For several years we had realized that there is much more to citation than simply understanding the technical details of how to write the author’s name, when to write the page number and how to present a complete bibliography in an academic essay. We understood citation as the superficial manifestation of a much deeper, elemental feature of academic writing, which is the analysis of and selection from sources, and subsequent integration and synthesis of knowledge and ideas into a coherent whole.

 

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Discourse and reflexivity: writing honest hut guiity text

to write postmodern’is to write paradoxically aware of one’s complicity in that which one critiques.

(Lather, 1991: 10)

My ‘complicity’ in what I shall critique in this book is deep. While writing academic discourse, I shall be critiquing it. While investigating the multivoiced text, I shall be writing one. While attempting to deconstruct such notions as ‘plagiarism’, I shall often feel like a thief. Crucially, I am intensely aware of the extent to which my meaning is a construction of the meanings of many others: those I read, those I live with, work with, the staff and students I interviewed for this book. Some of them I am able to acknowledge, and some not. Of some of my words I do not know the origin, but they have never been only ‘mine’. Like Lather, I see some way out of this dilemma of critique/collaboration by trying to be as self-consciously reflexive as possible of my stances and positions.

The way in which I choose to write this book is to remain within a recognizable discourse of language in education, but to legitimate elements of an/other kind of discourse in academic writing. The principal way in which I do this is to use metaphor, in order to open up my thinking to the thoughts of others, and to provide unity and coherence. I make conscious use of metaphor-(and unconscious, as we all do) throughout this book. Lakoff and Johnson (1980) argue convincingly that metaphors, often unperceived as metaphor, actually shape perception, thought and action. They demonstrate, for instance, how the metaphor of ‘argument as war’ structures how we think about argument, with expressions such as ‘attack’ and ‘defend’. They posit a different culture where argument might be understood as dance (5), a metaphor which I shall use extensively, though differently, in this book. They suggest that in such a culture, where the aim of argument would be to demonstrate balance and beauty, people would think about argument differently, and would argue differently.

The word metaphor comes from the Greek ‘metaphor a’ meaning ‘to carry over’ (Bowers and Flinders, 1990: 34). It allows us to carry over and apply one schematic frame to another, and this requires imagination and opens language up to multiple interpretations through symbol. I am very aware that metaphorical meanings are culturally based. Nevertheless I think the fact that dance, for example, means different things to different readers is part of the symbolic openness, and part of the power, of metaphor.

I wish to respect the notions of discourse which are developed in the next chapter, as fundamentally social and contextual, by encouraging the reader to reinterpret and recontextualize what I write. I invite others to dance with me, and to take my dance and make it their own.

Note

1. There were several other education structures:a department for whites, one for ‘coloureds’(people of mixed raee)and one for Asians, as well as Education Departments for each of the sc-called‘hornelands of the apartheid system.

Part

I

Dancing a Theoretical Stance

2

Discourses and access: dancers in the wings

I begin in this chapter with a theoretical framework for understanding plagiarism. In the sections following, I view my context through the lens of theories of discourse and genre, arguing that control of powerful discourses and the genres in which they are expressed is a crucial means of access.

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The tacit nature of discourses:tribal dances

Bourdieu and Passeron (1994: 8) write that ‘Academic language is a dead language for the great majority of French people, and is no one’s mother tongue’. Though I believe that academic discourse is very much alive within the borders of its social context, Bourdieu and Passeron’s point is that it is something that has to be learned, as it is not anybody’s home language. It is also a discourse which is closer to the home-based discourses of particular groups, and therefore in itself perpetuates differential success rates within the university. They argue that democratizing the academy not only means granting access into the institution to those who are not ‘children of the cultivated classes’. (8) Success within the institution means also that the exclusive nature of academic discourse has to be addressed, as it is crucial for success in examinations. They go on to say that if you define criteria for assessment and make a framework of expectations clear and explicit, you can significantly reduce the disadvantages of the ‘disfavoured groups’ (22) without favouring any group in particular. In other words, making the codes of academic discourse explicit has advantages for all students.

Academic discourses are deeply yet often unconsciously understood by those who practise them daily, i.e. academics. Ballard and Clanchy (1988) throw some light on the disjunctives, as represented by the letter quoted in Chapter 1, between academics and their students. For them academic literacy is ‘a student’s capacity to use written language to perform those functions required by the culture in ways and at a level judged acceptable by the reader’ (8). Theirs is an anthropological conception of academic literacy, in that they see academic disciplines as ‘cultures’ where there is a fundamental link between ‘the culture of knowledge and the language by which it is maintained and expressed’ (7). The academics in a discipline, as full members of this culture, have a set of cultural understandings and codes, which the academics themselves know intimately but mostly unconsciously, and therefore seldom make explicit to students. Compounding this situation is Rose’s concept of the ‘myth of transience’, where the ‘writing problem’ is seen as something transient which will go away ‘if we can just do x or y’ and then ‘higher education will be able to return to its real work’ (Rose, 1985: 355). This is a myth: academic literacy can only be achieved by engaging with the discipline, and writing is intimately related to disciplinary inquiry. Thus we need to understand a discipline as a culture with its own set of rules and behaviours, which is learnt best within the culture. Writing is an integral part of the way in which the culture is expressed, developed and maintained. This leads us to an understanding of why, unless the codes are explicitly taught, historically excluded students are at greater risk: their distance from the cul...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Real Language Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: an overture
• Part I Dancing a Theoretical Stance
• Part II A Multivoiced Text: The Chorus
• Part III Conclusion: a finale
• Appendix Previous educational writing experience
• References
• Index of authors
• Index of terms